With GCP, Living Consumer Products has delivered a casual dating service that has 4.8 million registered users and feeds data into a digital marketing service that generates annualised revenues of 45 crore rupees.

Google Cloud Platform Results

Delivered almost 100 percent availability for the iCrushiFlush casual dating service and Contextual Digital Platform digital marketing service

Ensured Living Consumer Products’ engineer spends only one hour per month on infrastructure management

Ensured Living Consumer Products’ engineer spends only one hour per month on infrastructure management

By signing on to iCrushiFlush through Facebook, users provide details such as gender, location and interests, as well as headshot images. iCrushiFlush stores this information in a database and displays it to other iCrushiFlush users through an algorithm, depending on compatibility.

Achieved nearly 100 percent availability and met performance requirements for its services despite growing at nearly 20 percent year on year

Users can choose to send a ‘crush’ to another user, or ‘flush’ them as undesirable. All actions are anonymous until two people mutually ‘crush’ on each other. The app then provides a communication channel for those users, who can also send gifts to each other using an in-app currency called cF.

“iCrushiFlush has 4.8 million users, of which 1.4 million are active on a monthly basis,” says Amit Vora, Chief Executive Officer, Living Consumer Products. “As well as providing a dating service that meets the needs of people in India today, iCrushiFlush provides data that we use to provide highly targeted digital marketing services for 25 large companies to date. These services currently generate annualised revenues of around 45 crores in Indian rupees.”

Living Consumer Products’ CDP leverages the iCrushiFlush data to enable brands to target groups of users with personalised advertisements.

Due to the large data volumes generated by iCrushiFlush and CDP, as well as the need to allocate scarce personnel and financial resources to business projects, Living Consumer Products decided to operate in the cloud from day one. However, testing and early experiences with public cloud services did not meet the company’s cost requirements. “As a startup business, we had to be very careful about our finances so we were on the lookout for the cloud service that provided the best value to us,” Vora says. “In addition, availability and scalability – particularly in light of our 25 percent year on year growth – were non-negotiables, as we couldn’t afford downtime that might drive users away.”

Living Consumer Products migrated iCrushiFlush and CDP to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in just two and a half days and is now running the services on Google Compute Engine to provide compute power, Google Cloud Storage to provide unified cloud storage and Google Cloud SQL to run its relational database. “We need to store and retrieve large volumes of data such as user images in real time and GCP enables us to do this,” says Vora.

Ease of use a key benefit

Vora cites ease of use as another key benefit of GCP relative to other cloud services. “I think my grandma could create an instance in GCP! That’s the beauty of Google,” he says. “Overall, my engineer is now only spending an hour a month managing infrastructure, which frees him up to develop products, design databases and write applications.”

“Overall, my engineer is now only spending an hour a month managing infrastructure, which frees him up to develop products, design databases and write applications.”

—Amit Vora, Chief Executive Officer, Living Consumer Products

No downtime experienced

Living Consumer Products has not experienced any downtime since completing the migration to GCP, assuring iCrushiFlush users that the service will be available as required. The businesses using the CDP can also be confident that the service will be available and responsive to reach desired niche audiences.

The business has no plans to move from GCP in future. “I am extremely satisfied with the cost and we’re an extremely price-sensitive company,” says Vora. “We anticipate growing considerably over the next few years and GCP’s prices are structured to support companies like us. Furthermore the simplicity ensures that I do not have to dedicate my engineer’s time to performing activities that can easily be performed with a few clicks on a console on GCP.”

About Living Consumer Products

Headquartered in Mumbai, India, Living Consumer Products runs two flagship products; a casual dating app called iCrushiFlush and a Contextual Digital Platform (CDP) that provides digital marketing services to clients.